Assassin’s Creed IV Writer Discusses ‘Black Flag’

Among the pantheon of open-world games like Grand Theft Auto and The Elder Scrolls, Assassin’s Creed is the rare example of a top-tier game developer managing to turn out a new title every year in time for the holiday season. While GTA players had to wait almost half a decade to experience Rockstar’s trademark sense of urban mayhem again this fall, fans of Ubisoft 's historically-minded series have been able to step into the shoes of one legendary assassin or another almost every year since the series debuted in 2007.

Ubisoft’s unparalleled efficiency in turning these games out is no doubt impressive. But as the series has matured, fans have begun to worry that the commercial pressures placed on the franchise have forced it down some strange creative rabbit holes. By the time Ubisoft revealed that Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag would put players in the role of an “assassin trained by pirates,” many feared that the series had abandoned any semblance of narrative credibility.

Judging by the game’s early reception, it seems that many of these fears were misplaced. With “Black Flag” out this week, Speakeasy talked with lead writer Darby McDevitt about how the studio tried to breathe new life into the series by bringing it out to sea.

Assassin’s Creed has always jumped all over the place in space and time, but the core gameplay has remained pretty much the same for its entire history. What points do you determine that you’re able to change, say in this game versus Assassin’s Creed III or Revelations?

That’s actually something we discussed a lot in the making of this game: how many times can you make an Assassin’s Creed game with the core pillars before people just stop, you know, caring? It’s not enough to make a couple different textures, a couple different buildings, get some actors to speak in accents, and think you have another time period! If the gameplay remains the same, people are going to notice after awhile. So one of the things you can do—and I hope Assassin’s Creeds in the future keep going in this direction—is get inspired by the historical setting, make sure to create major gameplay loops that are inspired by it. Even though our major pillars are parkour, stealth, assassinating, our game is the first that’s really not afraid to announce: we are also a pirate game. There’s a massive pirate gameplay loop. It’s almost a fourth pillar. And I hope that going forward every game takes a unique fourth pillar from its time period, that every game justifies itself with something special about its time period so that it does feel necessary and unique.

Do you ever worry about the series jumping the shark? As you said, there were a lot of raised eyebrows when people first heard the phrase “a pirate trained by assassins.” And even core fans seemed a little concerned with how the meta-narrative of the series would continue after the craziness of Assassin’s Creed III’s ending.

I think that taking Desmond out of the story actually freed us up in a big way by changing how we handled the present-day part of the narrative. It’s a series of bookends, an environment that continually moves forward with our own present day. But we don’t need as urgent a narrative arc as we did in the past, and that’s tremendously freeing. I remember when I was writing Revelations, I was writing one-third of Ezio’s story and one-fifth of Desmond’s story. That’s a really hard thing to keep in your head. We want to make it easier on ourselves to tell one good story per game.

As for the past, I don’t think anybody needs to have any concerns about it jumping the shark. We’re open to lots of harpooning the shark jokes though! We knew that people would scratch their heads a bit when they first heard about the theme, but once they step in they’ll see what we’ve done. This wasn’t a mandate that came down from Paris to make a pirate game. We wanted to give this generation the pirate game it deserved—the Red Dead Redemption, if you will.

Pirates have been handled so comically by popular fiction that I wonder how you avoided devolving into caricature.

That’s the thing—we’ve always found ourselves defending the pirates because people bring more baggage to them than any other theme we’ve ever done. There’s not a single “yar” in the game. There’s one very judicious use of the word lubber (laughs). We chose UK actors with the proper accents, because not all pirates are from Bristol as Disney would have you believe! If anything, I’m worried that people might be disappointed if they go in expecting a lot of peg legs. We deal with experienced sailors who rob people.

This is the first AC game without a surplus of statesmen, clergy, things like that. These are the 18th century equivalent of working class people—they’re sailors, slaves and ex-slaves, barkeeps. So in that respect, we have a different tone because we’re not dealing with people who have grand estates. The people we deal with would have been the poor men—mostly men—who had gone to sea with the royal navy and been screwed over, especially at the end of Spanish War of Succession. They were just left in the Caribbean to their own devices.

Assassin’s Creed is one of the rare games that attempts to portray historical dynamics with a sense of realism and political context. It’s one of the only games that even tries to broach a subject like slavery. But it still also lends itself to flights of fancy like, say, being an assassin trained by pirates. How do you approach these subjects in a way you think is appropriate?

The first thing to do is not shy away from it. There are a lot of people who would prefer that you just not mention it at all, which seems to me to be a more offensive way of handling it.

As we were mostly in the company of pirates who would probably have not had slaves themselves, we used the friendship between Adéwalé—the Jackdaw’s quartermaster—and Edward to talk about slavery throughout the game. I hate characters that have an innate nobility, a “correct” moral compass at all times, so I tried to write a number of scenes when Edward, in a kind of bumbling way, asks Adéwalé various things about being a slave. He makes a number of missteps and says the wrong things. At the beginning of their friendship he says “most of the men aboard this ship wouldn’t accept you as a captain, so you’re going to have to take a subordinate role.” Which is the reality of that period—I think there was maybe one record of a black captain at the time, but it would have been very bizarre for people to see that.

So I try to portray everything in a realistic way. I don’t try to correct anything. I think a lot of game writers get very ambitious and try to correct the wrongs of history in a single character. I remember reading a lot by Ta-Nehisi Coates when “Django Unchained” first came out, and one of his criticisms was the idea that the corrective to slavery could come in one person, this one guy who is fighting against slavery while all the other slaves were passively accepting their fate. Another one was the idea of a revenge narrative. I remember reading him saying that most of the slaves he encountered in his research just wanted to be left alone. He talks about how a the black activists of the fifties and sixties would have these fantasies of going to Europe where there was no racism but then they’d get there and say, “Oh crap it’s here too!”

I remember reading that article and going directly to write a monologue where Adéwalé says: “Where can I go to get away from this? I can’t! So I’m going to hold my hope in this ship that we’re on right here, this Jackdaw, and hope that we can make at least this something worth living on.” Throughout [the game] you see Adéwalé get increasingly frustrated with Edward’s approach to egalitarian living. Edward doesn’t always live up to this pirate ideal that they’ve set for themselves, and it has pretty deep consequences for their friendship.

A lot of commentary about a show like Mad Men has emphasized that the show, for better or worse, uses a historical setting to make statements about the present. Do you have a contemporary”message” coming out of a game like Assassin’s Creed, or do you just want to flesh out what the golden age of piracy really was for the people involved in it?

It’s a bit of both. With conflicts like these, you find a universal quality to them when people back then behaved like they do now under similar circumstances. I’m always looking for those parallels, but it’s not the main goal. The main goal would be something more broad, to say: here are men and women in a specific historical circumstance. They behaved this way, just as we might behave in this time period.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I never try to write an allegory. There’s a flipside to that—these men [the pirates] were criminals. There’s no answer to the questions we raise, it’s more of an observation that: in these circumstances, there’s a high likelihood of men and women behaving in this way. That’s just interesting; and it’s worth knowing, worth understanding.

I’m maybe of the Joycian school where I like to pretend I’m above it all and paring my fingernails. I want to bring a period to life with all its complexity. And if I do that correctly, then it will automatically have resonances in the present day.